1.On February 16, 2009 at 8:45 pm hoff2 Said: |Edit Thishttp://www.fredautley.com/pdffiles/book18.pdf
The primary question is precisely the one which the
Webbs completely ignored: Who owns the state?
To retain its labor force the NKVD practiced cruel
jokes upon the prisoners who had lived through their
term of purgatory. For instance it was announced in the
Russian press that the prisoners liberated on completion
of the White Sea-Baltic Canal “had become so fond of
working collectively,” that they were being “allowed” to
take part in another great construction project, the
Moscow-Volga Canal.
I failed in my youth to perceive that communism is a substitute for religion and is essentially irrational in its mystical belief in inevitable progress through revolution.
Arcadi Berdichevsky, who became my husband in
1928, was a Russian Jew, who had studied at Zurich
University and emigrated to the United States in I 9 I 4.
They must have known that I perceived that high
Communist Party functionaries were getting the best of
everything and that all the sacrificing was being done by
the dumb crowds, the dragooned peasants and the help-
less workers.
There came to be, roughly speaking, the following
grades: First, what Russians call the Kremlin people,
commissars, chairmen of big trusts, members of the Cen-
tral Committee of the Soviets and of the Party-all the
highest Communist Party members.
Next came the OGPU shops which served food almost
as good and as plentiful as the shops for the Krmdovsky
(Kremlin) people. Then, Gort A, for high officials-all
Party men-and for a very few specially favored scien-
tists and engineers. Next, Gort B, for the “middle class”
-that is, Party men of lower rank and highly qualified
non-Party specialists.
In addition there were well-stocked shops for the Red
Army officers. There were also the various closed dis-
tributors for the factories producing capital goods. These
varied greatly from place to place. In some the workers
could obtain the official ration of butter and milk and
meat. In others none of these luxuries were ever on sale.
But the Krelnlovsky shops, Gort A, and Znsnab, (the
Foreigners Store) were always well stocked with food
and clothing unavailable to the a
But the Krelnlovsky shops, Gort A, and Znsnab, (the
Foreigners Store) were always well stocked with food
and clothing unavailable to the average Russian.
My husband, as a specialist, eventually received a book
for the Gort B shop allotting him two pounds of meat
and two pounds of butter a month and a small ration of
other food and some clothing. But this was not until
more than a year after his return. His rations from Gort
B were about the same as Vera received in her “Political
Only top-flight Communists were favored by ample
supplies of food and clothing. This device of Stalin’s,
which directly violated both Lenin’s formula of the
Party maximum, and Marx’s injunction that the official
was to be paid no more than a worker, was designed to
keep Party men loyal to him personally.
Any deviation from the Party line involved expul-
sion from the Party and the loss of these precious food
supplies. It also meant the withdrawal of many other
privileges awarded in kind and not in money: use of an
automobile, the pick of housing accommodations, special
hospitals, and an exclusive medical service reserved for
the new aristocracy alone.
The closed distributors also enabled the government
to discriminate in favor of the aristocracy with the
scarcest goods, such as fruits, fresh vegetables, cocoa,
chocolate, and butter and eggs. This system had the
additional advantage of permitting the Soviet Govern-
ment propagandists at that time to tell the world that
Communist Party members never received salaries higher
than the Party maximum of 300 rubles.
Actually the salaries of high Communists were worth
ten to twenty times as much as those of the non-Party
specialists, who in theory were supposed to be getting
more, and than those of the skilled workers, who were
supposed to be paid about the same as the Party func-
tionaries.
but as I had already perceived in Japan, it was the
wives of the Bolsheviks who led the parade in the de-
generation of the Party and showed so obviously the
characteristics of the nouveau riche society then coming
into being.
We knew, of course, why there was famine in Russia,
and the situation which had led up to the “liquidation of
the Kulaks” with all its attendant cruelty and dislocation
67
By 1926, nearly two-thirds of the grain on the market
was being sold by a mere six per cent of the peasants, the
Kulaks. These Kulaks were selling to middlemen; and a
new “petty bourgeoisie” of shopkeepers, restaurant op-
erators, and small industrialists had cropped up like mush-
rooms after a ram. The state could no longer lay its
hands on enough grain to export even a small quantity
to pay for the importation of machinery. Handicraft in-
dustries were reviving to serve the local needs of the
village.
Coercion and intimidation were impracticable unless
the peasants could be herded together like the workers
in the factories. Collective farming was therefore or-
dered by decree- not the voluntary pooling of resources
by the poorer peasants, encouraged by state credits and
able to produce more than individual farms by being
supplied with machinery, which Trotsky had advocated
-but collectivization by the knout.
with the object of getting
all the peasants together under the control of the secret
police so that they could be forced to labor.
Then began the wholesale murder of the Kulaks by
the Soviet state, which is almost unparalleled in history
for its cruelty. I use the word murder deliberately, for
although the Kulaks were not lined up and shot, they
were killed off in a manner far more cruel. Whole
families, men, women, children and babies, were thrown
out of their homes, their personal possessions seized, even
their warm clothing torn off of them. Then, packed in-
to unheated cattle cars in winter, they were sent off to
Siberia or other waste parts of the Soviet Union.
Some survived to start life again and build farms in
the waste lands into which they had been exiled. Women
and children perished. Hundreds of thousands of peasants
were herded off to the timber prison camps in the Arctic
regions, to die like flies from hunger, cold and exhausting
labor, whipped by the OGPU guards and treated like the
slaves of Pharaoh or of an Asiatic tyrant.
Shura told me terrible stories of what was going on.
He and Grischa had been sent on their vacation with
other young students to help institute by these horrible
cruelties a “socialist agricultural system” in the villages.
A friend of Arcadi’s who worked in the Timber Export
organization made my blood run cold with his account
of the merciless treatment of the political prisoners at
Archangel where the ex-Kulaks in chain gangs loaded
wood for export.
When the father of a Kulak family was arrested, all
food in the house was confiscated, down to the last
sack of flour. The wife and children were left to starve
to death. Mothers sometimes killed their babies to save
them from lingering death by famine. The story re-
ported by Malcolm Muggeridge, then correspondent of
the Manchester Guardian in the USSR, is typical of
many of the gruesome tragedies of that terrible time.
A woman in a Cossack village in the Caucasus, whose
husband was arrested and taken off to forced labor as a
Kulak, had her last sack of flour confiscated by the
OGPU officer, Comrade Babel. When he had left she
looked at her three children asleep by the stove. There
was no food and no hope of securing any. She got an
axe and killed the children as they slept.
Then, after tying each child up in a flour sack, the
mother went to town and reported to Comrade Babel
that she had decided she ought no longer to defy the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and confessed that she
had three more sacks of flour hidden away. Comrade
Babel went back with her, along the snowy road, to
her house. She took him up to the loft and showed him
three bulging sacks. As he bent under the rafters to
look, she killed him with the axe.
Of course the woman was shot, and Comrade Babel’s
heroic death “on the class-war front” was reported in
Moscow newspapers. Pravda spoke of the “plots” of
the class enemy, of the need “to root out mercilessly all
hostile elements in the villages.” The case was reported
as one in which “a notorious counter-revolutionary, wife
of an exiled Kulak, lured Comrade Babel to her house
with false promises and murdered him in the loft with
an axe.”
Such incidents as these were not recognized as acts
of blind revenge. They were represented as “sympto-
matic of the new tactics of Kulak elements” seeking to
destroy the socialist state.
Fear of reprisals by the desperate, starving, expro-
priated peasants drove the Party to attempt to extermi-
nate their victims. “We must destroy our enemies until
not one is left,” was the daily cry in the newspapers.
An orgy of cruelty raged in the countryside. We must
go back to the days of the Mongol hordes sweeping
across Asia and eastern Europe in the thirteenth century,
or to the massacres by the Assyrians in Biblical times,
for an historical parallel with the Communist “class
war” against the Russian peasants.
Many motives, fanatical faith, fear, sadism, revenge,
played their role in this horrible massacre of the inno-
cents by famine and the firing squad. Jews who re-
membered old pogroms in the Russian villages, workers
who had suffered under the Cossack whips in Tsarist
times, gave vent to dusty and dim hatreds sanctified
under the banner of the class war.
Earnest young men and women whose best instincts
were perverted by orders given them by the Communist
Party, convinced themselves that in depriving the peas-
ants of their last stores of food they were helping to
build a socialist society. OGPU and Red army officers
sent to carry on the “war on the agrarian front” feared
that if they were not absolutely merciless they would be
stabbed in the back on dark nights by desperate peasants.
The Kulaks, now declared enemies of the state, were
in theory the exploiting peasants, those who rented extra
land and employed hired labor, or who advanced money
or seed at high rates of interest to the poorest peasants.
Kulak means a fist, and the word originally signified
an exploiter and a usurer. Under Stalin the word came to
mean any peasant who dared to oppose collectivization.
Long before the period of forced collectivization, the
Bolsheviks had endeavored to break the solid front which
the villages presented to the cities and the Soviet state,
by promoting a class war in the villages. It was hoped
that if some peasants could be set against others, it
would be possible to break the solid opposition of the
peasants to what they viewed as an exploitation of the
agricultural population for the benefit of the city
workers.
In order to stimulate class warfare, the peasants were
registered in three classes: Kulaki, Seredniaki (middle
Revival of Serfdom
peasants), and Bedniaki (poor peasants). In villages
where there was a dead level of poverty, the local Com-
munists were nevertheless ordered to find Kulaks even
where none existed.
A story was told me of how in one village the local
chairman of the Committee of the Poor exibited a
family of Kulaks quite in the manner of showing a
family of lepers on whom the judgment of God had
fallen. He regarded them with hopeless pity a
and said
that all the troubles in the village dated from the time
when the villagers had been compelled to divide them-
selves into the three classes.
When the query was put as to why the family was
regarded as Kulaks, he replied that someone had to be
a Kulak, and that this family many years before had
owned a village inn. They no longer had it, but there
was apparently no hope of their ever losing their status
as a K&k family.
If they should there would be no other family to take
their place as the local Public Enemy, and for some
reason unknown to anyone, the Soviet Government in-
sisted that each village must produce at least one Kulak
family to be hated and oppressed.
These KuZaki had no electoral rights, had to pay
forty per cent of their miserable income to the state, and
their children were not allowed to go to school. Thus
Stalin used the technique of artificially focussing hatred
on the innocent, which Hitler copied in the case of the
J ews.
Kulaks who “exploited” other peasants were hard to find,
the designation was applied to every peasant who was a
little better off than his neighbors, to anyone who owned
two horses and two cows, or had managed in some way
to lift himself a little above the miserably low general
standard of life in the Russian village. It meant that
hard work and enterprise were penalized wherever they
were found. What Tartar invasions and long centuries
of feudal oppression had begun, the Soviet Government
consummated.
Precisely those peasants who had the knowledge,
skill, and industry to raise Russian agriculture above its
medieval level were liquidated. The collective farms were
deprived of the men who could have made them function
efficiently.
The army of city workers sent down to coerce the
peasants and manage the collectives took far more from
Revival of Serfdom 79
the villages in the shape of wages than the Kulaks had
ever taken as profit. If, by allowing them a larger share of
the produce than the other peasants, the Kulaks had been
persuaded to run the new farms, instead of being killed
off or imprisoned, the system might possibly have
worked.
It was, of course, argued that the Kulaks were irrec-
oncilably hostile to the Soviet state. But they had never
been given a chance to be other than hostile. The govern-
ment discriminated against them, reviled them, and in-
stigated everyone to loathe them. Naturally they hated
the Soviet Government. But to argue that they were
irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet state is like saying
that the Jews in Germany deserved what they got
because they hated the Nazi Government which op-
pressed them.
By
1934, the number of horses in Russia was half what it
had been in 1929, and the sheep and pigs less than half.
Trotsky described the process in the following words:
“Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms which
80 Lost Illusion
yesterday had been the sole motive force of agriculture-
weak as an old farmer’s nag, but nevertheless forces-the
bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture by the com-
mands of 2,000 collective farm administrative offices,
lacking technical equipment, agricultural knowledge, and
the support of the peasants themselves.”
Trotsky called Stalin’s program a blind, violent gam-
ble. The left opposition had never advocated anything
so drastic, so rapid, and so unprepared. It had envisaged
gradual collectivization over a period of fifteen years.
Stalin, having at last decided upon collectivization,
thought he could force it through by terror exercised
against the whole peasant population.
He laid waste the countryside and caused the death
of between five and ten million peasants by starvation.
Russian morale has never recovered from those terri-
ble years. The Communist Party and the Comsomols be-
came the expropriators of the people, an army of oc-
cupation in their own country.
Revival of Serfdom
inhumanity. Many of the young people became hardened
and cynical careerists prepared to commit any atrocity
commanded by Stalin. Some thus became moral perverts,
sadists who enjoyed the tortures which they were
ordered to inflict on the helpless victims of the OGPU.
The war on the Russian peasants was more brutalizing
than war against another nation, for the peasants were
unarmed and defenseless. The present generation of
Communists was brutalized in youth by the pogrom con-
ducted against the peasants.
Meanwhile the workers in the factories found them-
selves suffering almost as great a degree of privation as
in the years of civil war. Not only did Stalin’s violent
A terrible famine set in, especially severe in the rich
corn-bearing lands of the Ukraine. This time there was
no food relief poured in to Russia from the United States
as it was in 1922 under the leadership of Herbert Hoover,
since the Soviet Government denied to foreigners that
there was a famine.
Foreign journalists were not allowed to visit the South.
All Russia knew what was happening; but the hacks of
the foreign press, obedient to Stalin for fear of losing
their jobs, sent out no word. Only a few brave and hon-
est correspondents like Eugene Lyons of the United
Press, William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Sci-
ence Monitor, and Malcolm Muggeridge, then corre-
spondent of the Manchester Guardian, told the truth and
were expelled from Russia, or put in a position in which
they were ultimately forced to leave. Others followed
the lead of Walter Duranty of the New York Times and
denied the existence of a famine, until years later.
Foreign visitors, carefully shepherded by Intourist,
and given huge meals in the hotels of the starving land,
went home to deny the rumors of famine. I well remem-
ber the delegation from England in 1932 which included
Mrs. G. D. H. Cole and various professors from London
University. One of them, a lecturer at the London
School of Economics, told me as we ate a bountiful meal
at the New Moscow Hotel (at his expense) that it was
all nonsense about the famine, for at Kiev he had been
given caviar, butter, eggs, and coffee for breakfast! I had
to let him talk, for I knew if I told him the truth and he
repeated it, my husband would be sent to prison.
Stalin’s utter ruthlessness won the day. The resistance
of the peasants was broken. Since 1932 they have known
that they wili starve unless they produce the quota taken
by the government and in addition enough to feed tliem-
selves. They have been forced to work on the govern-
ment’s terms. They have become serfs again. Their work
on the collective farms is forced labor, and corresponds
to the labor service rendered to his overlord by the serf
in medieval times.
Recalcitrant peasants were threatened
with expropriation and exile called “transportation to
sparsely populated regions.”
The new drive against the peasants inaugurated just
before the Second World War no doubt explains why
the Germans succeeded in getting whole battalions of
Russians under General Vlassov to join them. But the
Germans, like Napoleon a century earlier, passed up
a great opportunity to alter the course of the war.
Napoleon in his memoirs wrote that if he had freed
the Russian serfs he would not have been defeated, and
that he had not done so because he had always been in
favor of law and order. The Germans in the Ukraine,
although allowing a limited return to private ownership
of the land, were too anxious to get food from the coun-
try to abolish the collective farms. They retained the
Soviet system of squeezing the people.
What collectivization has done is to make the state
confiscation of crops by forced grain deliveries much
easier. A small detachment of OGPU soldiers in each
district can terrify the collectives into giving up the
greater pan’of the harvest, whereas an enormous number
of troops would be required to terrorize each individual
peasant cultivating his own farm.
J
ANE TABRISKY AND I were not long in Moscow
without sensing the terror then in full operation against
non-Party intellectuals. Communist Party members still
felt comparatively safe. They were not as likely to hear
the fatal knock at the door in the night which meant
that the OGPU had come to claim a victim.
I remember the case of Arcadi’s friend, a gentle,
elderly Jew named Kipman, which illustrates both the
cruelty and stupidity of the OGPU. He was arrested
the winter of 193 I on returning with his wife from
London, where he had worked for several years at the
Soviet Trade Representation. He was accused of having
embezzled I 0,000 pounds.
My friends who knew him were certain that he was
absolutely honest. It was moreover obvious that if he
had taken the money he and his wife, who were both
over sixty years old, would have stayed in London and
lived on it for the rest of their lives. However, Kipman
“confessed” to the crime and was sent to a Siberian
prison for five $years.
His wife, in spite of her age and failing health, strug-
gled valiantly for years to get him out of prison. She
appealed, she made representations, she produced proofs
of the falseness of the charge. At the end of three years
she succeeded in getting his case re-examined. It was
then found that the money had, in fact, never been
lost, but there had been a mistake made in the accounts
for which Kipman was in no way responsible.
He was brought back to Moscow and set free, but a
few days before he arrived his wife died, worn out by
anxiety, poverty and her efforts to secure his release.
I remember seeing Kipman in the Narcomveshtorg
Stolovaya (Dining Room of Peoples Commissariat for
Foreign Trade) one day, white-haired, stooped, with
lifeless eyes.
The fact that he was working and living abroad and
had Jania’s stepmother with him in London, did not
mean that his ration was cut off. Jania drew eleven
pounds of butter and a large number of eggs every ten
days, Sold at commercial prices (about five times as high
as the price she paid) these supplies produced an income
equal to more than half her monthly salary as a clerk in
an office.
Jania’s flat was always full of young men in the
evenings, and when I once remarked to her how popular
she was, she replied seriously,
“Oh, no, it isn’t that; they just all want to marry me
because we have a flat.”
Jania was a decent sort and honest. She made no pre-
tense of admiring or believing in Soviet policies and
eventually married beneath her. She was in love with a
young engineering student who was not a Comsomol
and could never be a member of the Communist Party,
because his father, a highly qualified engineer, was of
bourgeois background.
Years later I met Jania for the last time before leaving
Russia. She was working in the Intourist office in Mos-
cow where I bought my ticket to England. Very pale,
very thin, all the gaiety and youth gone from her face,
she was dying of tuberculosis and knew it.
Because she had married outside her class, her father
no longer had anything to do with her. Jania and her
husband and child all lived in one room. She had, of
course, no hope of getting to a sanatorium, since neither
she nor her husband were members of the Communist
Party.
Being non-Party, he had had to wait years and pay
several thousand rubles before getting his flat. Com-
munist Party men, if not already in possession of a de-
cent apartment built before the Revolution, and taken
possession of during its early years, often secured a new
flat without payment, or by only a year or so of mem-
bership payments to a Cooperative.
In any case, the Party men always had priority, and
thus could secure the precious capital which a flat rep-
resented without a large previous investment. Most own-
ers made a super-profit on renting rooms, but whereas
the Communist Party member could charge anything the
market would bear, the non-Party man was afraid of
doing this, for he might be accused of speculating.
It was here in our room on Tmbnaya UZitsa, near the
Sukharevsky Market, that I first witnessed the terrible
exploitation of servants, Jania had done her own house-
A young Russian whom I had formerly known
at the London School of Economics, and who lived in
one room with his wife and child, shared a toilet and
kitchen with 35 other people in the same flat.
Several of the families housed in one apartment would
each have a servant. It was not uncommon for three or
four servants to sleep together in the kitchen, side by
side on the floor or on the kitchen table. Bugs ran over t
hem at night, and the atmosphere was so fetid and foul
that one hesitated to go in to boil water for tea or to
wash.
The employers of these girls were often little better
off themselves. A family of four to a room, feeding
poorly, would hire a servant main
mainly in order to have
someone to stand in line at the shops for food. Even the
limited rations called for by the food cards could not be
obtained without a long wait; and this, together with
foraging around for unrationed food occasionally avail-
able in the shops, was almost a full-time occupation.
The waste of labor entailed in the socialist fatherland
by the hopelessly inefficient distribution system, and by
the shortage of food and clothing, was such as to make
it easy to believe that there could be no unemployment
problem. If husband and wife both worked at a large
enterprise and there were no children, a maid could be
dispensed with since they could eat dinner in the stolo-
vaya (restaurant) of the factory or office.
But if there were children, food must be found for
them somehow. Party men of high standing kept maids
to spare their wives labor, but the great majority of the
families who employed domestic workers did so in spite
of their poverty, or because of their poverty. Enough
food for the children could be bought only if both
parents worked; but someone must do the shopping.
Hence the necessity of having a servant.
The terrible exploitation of domestic labor was in
part due to the poverty of the employers, and in part to
the exodus of peasant girls from the hunger-stricken
Arcadi Caught in the Web 99
villages. To be allowed to live in the towns and get
some sort of a meal every day was to be incomparably
better off than in the village, even if the girl had to work
sixteen hours out of twenty-four.
Work in the factories (even if obtainable without
close probing into why they had left the village and as to
whether their parents were Kulaks) could not secure
them a shelter. So they went to work as servants.
Servants were consequently easy to get and, being un-
protected by Soviet law or by Russian custom, could be
exploited mercilessly. There was no alternative for them
except starvation, and they were practically slaves. On
the other hand, they naturally had little moral sense.
Their village world had been destroyed, they or their
peasant neighbors had been expropriated and robbed by
the state, and their religion vilified and reviled.
To be religious was tantamount to being considered
counter-revolutionary. So freed of moral and religious
inhibitions, they stole whatever they could lay their
hands on. Russian housewives locked up every bit of
food and kept a strict watch upon their scanty ward-
robes.
It was typical of the relation between mistress and
maid in the Soviet Union that when the German Com-
munists, who still retained the socialist ideal of human
equality, wanted their servants to sit and eat with them,
they found themselves misunderstood.
“The Kazaika,” the servants said, “is so afraid of our
eating too much that she forces us to sit with her at table
to keep an eye on how much food we consume.”
The contrast between my living standard
and that of ordinary Russian workers was greater than
between ours and the Communist hierarchy. Workers
still lived in barracks or in hovels and as one elderly
woman said to me, “at least under the Tsar we had
enough bread to eat.”
I was receiving over four pounds of butter, thirteen
pounds of meat, and thirty eggs a month, besides cheese,
flour, millet, buckwheat, semolina, and even one pound
of rice-most precious cereal in Russia. I could also buy
milk if I arrived at the Insnab store at the right time,
and quite often I could obtain metana and prostakwasha
(sour cream and sour milk.)
Sometimes vegetables, fruit and chocolate were also on
sale. Arcadi’s ration was a good deal smaller than mine
but compared to that of the workers, and that of the
ordinary run of employees, we were rich.
Arcadi finally broke down when he went on a Ko-
rvtanderofka to Odessa in April I 93i. He came back
white and miserable and shaken. In the South he had
seen the starving and the dead in the streets. At each rail-
way station en route there had been hundreds and hun-
dreds of starving wretches, emaciated women with dying
babies at their milkless breasts, children with the swollen
stomachs of famine, all begging, begging for bread.
In station waiting rooms he had seen hundreds of
peasant families herded together awaiting transporta-
tion to imprisonment in the concentration camps. He had
seen children dying of starvation and typhus, scare-
–
crows of men and women pushed and kicked by the
OGPU guards. It sickened even those of us who were
hardened to the sight of suffering in the Far East.
Arcadi had relatives in Odessa. From them he learned
the facts of the Ukrainian famine. The picture he painted
for me, a picture which had seared him to the soul and
shattered the optimistic view which he had until then
insisted upon preserving, bore out all the rumors we had
heard-was in fact worse.
What perhaps shocked Arcadi most of all was to find
that the train guards, conductors, and attendants were
apparently all black market speculators. They were buy-
ing food in Moscow, always better provided for than
other cities, and selling it at fantastic prices down in the
stricken southern land.
Starving children are the most pitiful sight on earth.
Arcads’s Awakening 121
There were enough of them in Moscow to make one’s
heart ache, but in the Ukraine they were legion.
Bodies of the starving lay in the streets, and pitiful
wrecks of humanity with great watery blisters and boils
on their feet, legs, and arms, dragged themselves from
place to place till they died in the vain quest for work
and food.
That summer we went on a holiday to the Crimea,
taking with us my mother, who had just come from
England. We left Moscow well provided with food for
the long journey. But by the end of the first day my
mother had given it all away to the starving wretches at
the country railway stations.
With tears streaming down her face she called my at-
tention to one wretched beggar after another, especially
to the pitiful children. That journey was an ordeal I
shall never forget. It was a sea of misery which the few
bits of food we had could do nothing to assuage.
“Totia dai Kleb, Totia dai Kleb” (Auntie, give
bread), will always ring in my ears as the national song
of ‘Socialist Russia.”
As in China, so in Russia you had to harden yourself
to the sight of suffering in order to live. But at least in
China the government does not hold it a crime to give
aid to the starving. In Russia the officials told you that
the starving were Kulaks or counter-revolutionaries not
to be helped, although in reality they were bewildered,
ignorant, powerless wretches sacrificed to the insensate
ambitions and fanaticism of a man and a party,
It was the contrasts which were always so appalling.
The fat officials in the dining car, the well-fed callous
OGPU guards, and the starving people. We and they, we
and they, rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed.
In the rest home in the Crimea, where we had got
places, there was abundant food. So abundant that bread
and fruit, ices and cake were thrown away when left on
the plates of the guests, for whom too much had been
provided. This rest home belonged to the Central Com-
mittee of the Soviets of the Crimean Republic, and we
were there by the grace of Berkinghof, whom we had
known in London. He was a prominent Bolshevik who
belonged to this part of Russia.
It was so very “upper class Communist” that we really
had no business there, but it gave us an insight into the
life of the Party aristocracy. The sight and 6ound of the
starving was shut out from these former palaces and
country houses of the Russian nobility, now as in the
past. Now there was a new aristocracy. That seemed to
be the only difference.
This new Soviet aristocracy and its hangers-on were
even more grasping, cruel, and ruthless than the old
The Soviet state had found a more certain method of
breaking human beings than the crude physical tortures
inflicted by the Nazis on their victims. The Kremlin
learned that the surest way to break resistance to tyranny
was by threatening men through their wives and chil-
dren. How can the Russian worker strike when he knows
that not only will he be imprisoned but also that his
family will be thrown into the street immediately, and
his wife refused employment?
How can the intellectual refuse to write or speak the
lies demanded of him, when the NKVD tells him that if
he will not his wife will also be imprisoned and his chil-
dren left to become homeless waifs? Only the peasants,
too brutish and too tough, may occasionally defy the Soviet
Government by passive resistance.
The word “protection” was openly used in the USSR.
“So-and-so,” it would be said, “has a powerful protec-
tion; he’s likely to be all right.” If a non-Party man could
marry his daughter to a high Party official he felt very
secure, but this was difficult unless she were particularly
attractive, for Party men naturally wished to ally them-
selves to those who could be of use to them, not to non-
Party specialists.
Of all the cruel acts of Stalin the most horrible was the
provision for the liquidation of the older homeless chil-
dren. In 1935, when by decree the death penalty for
theft was made applicable to children from the age of
twel;e, the police were given the power to rid Soviet
society of the unwanted children of the unfortunate.
If you are the son or daughter of a prominent Com-
munist Party member in Russia, the way will be made
smooth for you and you will enjoy the same privileges as
the children of the rich in any capitalist country. You
will go to a select school with airy classrooms and the
best teachers. At home you will have a room of your
own to study in and plenty of books instead of trying,
like the children of the workers, to do your homework
in a small room in which your father and mother,
brothers and sisters live and sleep.
You will sleep in a good bed, not on the floor or in the
same bed as your brother and sister. You will eat the best
food and have long holidays in the country instead of
feeding on black bread, cabbage soup, and cucumbers
and spending the hot summer in the city. You will have
servants to wait upon you instead of having to stand in
line yourself at the shops when you come home from
school.
‘34 Lost Illusion
Equality of opportunity in the Soviet Union is a myth.
There are different schools for the masses and for the
Communist aristocracy. There can be no equality in edu-
cational opportunity where some children are under-
nourished and housed little better than pigs, while others
live in comparative luxury,
140 Lost Illusion
Living in the New Moscow Hotel I also got an inkling
of the luxurious lives of the secret police officers who
occupied many of the rooms. Enormous meals were
sent up to the next room to ours, and the sounds of
drinking and song and laughter came through the wall
late at night, when our OGPU neighbor entertained his
friends. The diners in the restaurant were either for-
eigners or OGPU officers, with very occasionally a
couple of ordinary citizens blowing a quarter or half a
month’s salary on a “bust.”
In 1943 he became the organizer in
New York for the Political Action Committee.
Clark Foreman
Russian society
was not for the most part sexually licentious except per-
haps in its upper ranks. Most Russians were far too busy
struggling to live at all, to have time or energy to imi-
tate the vices of Greenwich Village liberals, and mar-
riage was usually a serious partnership, not a light liaison.
All this time, in spite of our housing difficulties, our
standard of life was far above that of the majority of
workers and employees. We,did not rank with the Com-
munist aristocracy, but we were upper middle class. I
myself, with my h-nab ration book, could in fact be
counted as an aristocrat insofar as food was concerned.
But, although our living conditions were far better
than a year or two before, life for most people, that
winter of 1932-33, was more miserable than ever. The
scanty meat and butter rations which the industrial
workers were supposed to be able to buy were usually
unobtainable. Most Russians lived on black bread, millet,
and buckwheat.
That winter commercial shops began to be in evidence
in Moscow-that is, state stores where meat, butter, eggs,
vegetables, and clothing could be bought by anyone at
prices at least ten times higher than those paid for the
rations available to the privileged.
Butter, which cost us three and one-half r
“And how are you ? he asked. “You must be finding
life very hard.”
“Oh, no,” she replied, “I’m doing fine. My salary is
only I 20 rubles, but that provides me with a food card
and so with bread and sugar; for the rest I undress at
commercial prices.”
Incidentally, this story illustrates a fact ignored by the
tourist, who believed what he was told about the disap-
pearance of prostitution in Soviet Russia. It had only
disappeared in the sense that every prostitute needed
some kind of a regular job to ensure possession of a food
card. The job need not be her main source of income.
There was also a joke in those days about giving to
Mikoyan, the Commissar of Internal Trade, the task of
liquidating prostitution.
“Why Mikoyan?”
“Well, because everything else he controls disap-
pears! ”
Torgsin shops. Here one
could buy better and more abundant supplies than any-
where else except in the Kremlovsky distributors-if
Prices for food at Torgsin
were not much higher than world prices, and less than
double pre-war Russian prices. Everyone who had the
tiniest bit of gold–a ring, a bracelet, or jewels-could
exchange it for Torgsin tokens and secure food.
The only snag was that the OGPU was also on the
lookout for possessors
of gold, and might at any moment
arrest you and force you by torture to disgorge any
hidden wealth you had. So people went in fear and
trepidation to Torgsin, driven by hunger but fearful of
the OGPU. Torgsin was an outstanding example of the
mixed system of terror and reward by which the Russian
government seeks to increase its revenues.
The greatest source of income of the Torgsin shops
was remittances from abroad. Jews, in particular, often
had relatives in foreign countries-in Poland, in Ger-
many, and above all in the United States-who would
send them a few dollars a month to save them from
starvation. The percentage of Jewish people standing in
the Torgsin queues-there were lines even at these shops
since there were never enough sales people-was very
high.
Anti-Semitism, although officially condemned, took
a new lease on life when the Russians saw their Jewish
neighbors in the apartment kitchens cooking good food
which they never had a chance to buy. A few years later,
in the.great purge, countless Jewish families suffered for
their past enjoyment of a little food bought with money
received from abroad.
By 1936 it was held to be a crime to have relatives out- side of Russia. The Torgsin shops had been closed down,
and many Jews were arrested and sent to concentration
camps for the “crime” of having corresponded with for-
eign relatives. But from 193 2 to 193 5, the Soviet State
was anxious to secure valuta, foreign exchange, at any
cost and Torgsin served to produce a large revenue.
There was a story told in Moscow of two Jewish
women friends who met after many years. One asked the
other, a widow, how she was managing to live.
“Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “My son provides for
me.”
“Oh,” said the other, “is that your eldest son Boris,
whom I remember as a lad?”
“No, not Boris; he’s an engineer in Sverdlovsk earning
500 rubles, and since he has a wife and child he can’t, of
course, spare me a kopek.”
“Is it your son Ivan, then?”
“No, Ivan is chief accountant at an export organiza-
tion, and of course he can’t allow me anything out of his
salary of 400 rubles.”
“How, then, do you live?”
“I’m all right because my youngest son, Grischa, is
unemployed in America! ”
It was in fact the case that even two or three dollars a
month could ward off starvation, could enable the re-
cipient to buy a little flour and fat at a cost of one-tenth
of the prices paid for the same foods in Russian currency.
Neither Torgsin nor the new commercial shops pro-
vided relief except for a very small minority of the Rus-
sians who had relatives abroad willing to send them dol-
The government retaliated with ever increasing meas-
ures of compulsion. First it introduced the work certifi-
cate, the device subsequently copied by Hitler to ensure
the obedience of the working class to the all-powerful
State and Party.
This certificate was like a criminal dossier. In it was
written the social origins of each worker, any fines he
paid, any crimes he had committed, and the reasons for
his dismissal from his place of employment. If he could
not show good cause for having lost his job he was not
to be allowed to work elsewhere. This meant starvation.
Industrial workers were being reduced to the same
servitude as the peasants. Whereas the workers were
forbidden to leave their jobs, however bad their condi-
tions of work, the various trusts were given the right to
transfer them at will from one town or province to an-
other, regardless of their wishes.
The Labor Exchanges were closed down and unem-
‘54 Lost Illusion
ployment relief abolished. The unemployed were told
to go wherever they were sent and to whatever job the
state decreed.
Another cruel decree was issued punishing the worker
by dismissal if absent for a single day from the factory.
Even if ill he must produce a certificate showing that he
had a high temperature. Heavy fines were imposed for
being a few minutes late to work.
The cooperatives were placed under the direction of
the factory management, so that a worker leaving his
job or dismissed immediately lost his own and his family’s
bread ration.
The successive decrees tightening up labor discipline
made us realize we were living in a world in which the
working class which was supposed to be the master of
the state had lost all liberty and human rights. Anyone
who incurred the displeasure of foreman or manager
could be thrown out of his job and deprived of room
and food.
In a final attempt to tie the hungry workers to their
jobs, and the dissatisfied peasants to the collective farms,
Stalin resorted to an old Tsarist police measure in a more
universal and rigorous form. The internal passport sys-
tem was revived.
The whole urban population, and the peasants living
near the large towns, had to secure residence permits.
Subsequently no one was allowed to move from the
town or village in which he lived, even for a single night,
without permission from the police.
The internal passport, in which the social origins of
each citizen were written down, was designed to clear
out, and keep out, of Moscow and other large towns the
156 Lost Illusion
floating population drawn there by the slightly better
food supply available in the cities.
Violation of the internal passport regulations swelled
the millions of Russians condemned to forced labor in
concentration camps. Slave labor had become an essen-
tial factor in the economy of Russia, not too unlike the
dependence of the Southern States on negro slavery be-
fore the American Civil War.
Life as a so-called “free-worker,” bereft of nearly all
freedom is bad enough; but the life of a slave laborer
working for the vast organizations controlled
but the life of a slave laborer
working for the vast organizations controlled by the
NKVD is indescribable in its inhumanity and brutality.
Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submis-
sive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of
Stalin’s Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one
cringes before his superiors, and those who abase them-
selves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfor-
tunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity
disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood
and terror.
d terror.
Jane and I decided that the best term to apply to the
“new and better” society being created in Soviet Russia
was industrial feudalism Freedom of movement, collec-
tive bargaining for wage increases, strikes and other such
evils of capitalist society had been finally abolished. The
workers as well as the peasants bad become serfs of the
Party which owned the state.
Max Hoeltz’s end was tragic but at least he went down
fighting. Before he was liquidated by the OGPU he beat
up Fritz Heckert, the German representative in the
A Home at Last ‘59
Comintem who had announced that Hitler’s victory was
not a defeat for the German working class.
One of the most terrible and pitiful sights I saw was
one late afternoon in November 1933. Looking out of
the window I saw police driving some wrecks of human-
ity down into the cellar of our building. More and more
people were brought in as the evening fell. Going down
into the courtyard I was told by other occupants of our
apartment house
what was happening.
The police were rounding up all the beggars
and the
homeless
in the city prior to the November Revolution
celebrations. The foreigners must not see the starving,
homeless
hordes, so they were all to be dumped outside
Moscow.
Our cellar was one of the collection depots. Late in
the evening trucks arrived, and the beggars were pushed
into them. Some were sick, others lame. Many were
,I children. They were to be taken forty or fifty miles
1:
outside Moscow and dumped on the road to die, like
I’ abandoned dogs or cats. If the stronger ones managed
to straggle back to Moscow the celebrations would be
1 over by the time they got there.
/ We all watched that pitiful exodus from our windows.
I
A thin rain was falling and the air was damp and chilly.
Although by this time I should have been conditioned to
brutality, I was pregnant and it made me sick. Those
i
mothers down there with their cold and hungry children
being driven out into the desolate countryside must be
;; suffering unbearable anguish. It would have been more
1 merciful to shoot them outright.
There was less actual starvation but the privileged
were now more privileged and class distinctions more
openly displayed. More and more commercial shops
were opened with their windows full of food and cloth-
ing which ordinary people could not afford to buy.
Earlier when the meat, butter, chocolates, fruit, shoes
and clothing had been supplied to the Communist aris-
tocracy in closed distributors the masses were not fully
aware of the great gulf between them and their rulers.
Luxury had not been openly displayed but hidden and
unavowed. Now it was obvious to the dullest intelligence
that the fruits of their labor were not for the working
class and probably never would be. A bitter saying began
to be heard in Moscow,
“Yes, they have constructed socialism for themselves.”
The spirit of many of the German Communists who
had taken refuge in the Soviet Union was broken in
time. Looked upon always as potential foreign spies, dis-
liked or envied for their superior knowledge or intel-
ligence or diligence, with no government to protect
them, and persuaded or forced to become Russian citi-
zens, they were completely at the mercy of the Soviet
government.
Those who had been active revolutionaries in Ger-
many were most suspected, and thousands disappeared
during the great purges. Others became as shameless as
the Russians in calumniating their comrades to try to
save themselves by lying, hypocrisy, and false accusa-
tions.
American and British Party members, and in lesser de-
gree the French, were then on the contrary the favored
sons or daughters of the Soviet fatherland. There were
so few Communists in the West that minor deviations
were forgiven them. In Moscow they could count upon
an easy life and a good position without any great effort
on their part.
I was no longer a member of the Communist aristoc-
192 Lost Illusion
racy. I had let my membership in the British Communist
Party lapse and had not tried to transfer to the Russian
Communist Party. Nevertheless as an Anglichanka
(Englishwoman) I was in a privileged position. More-
over the fact that I had had a book published both in
England and the Soviet Union added greatly to my
prestige.
Others did not escape so easily. There was one poor
Jewish woman, a widow with two children to support,
who was denounced for having had her son circumcised
fourteen years earlier. She could not deny the accusation
and she lost her Party card and was dismissed from our
Institute.
The Soviet Government even in those days denied
that it persecuted religion but it was a fact that anyone
known to go to church or to a synagogue, or to have any
religious beliefs, could rarely, if ever, obtain a good job.
Membership in the Communist Party with the privileges
this gave was, of course, out of the question for either
Christians or orthodox Jews.
Mao Tse-tung and the other Chinese Communist lead-
ers remained prudently in Yenan in their own Soviet
Chinese territory where they could not easily be inter-
fered with although they accepted Moscow’s orders.
We, the scientific workers at the Communist academy
together with the personnel of the China division of the
Comintem, were held responsible for their mistakes,
failures and deviations. We who supplied them with
their theoretical and practical instructions had to make
quick turns when the Comintern line changed.
Early in I 93 5 the Seventh Congress of the Comintem
switched all the Communist parties of the world over to
the Popular Front line or Trojan horse tactic. The Social
Democrats, Labor Parties and Trade Unions of the West
whom we had hitherto denounced as Social Fascists,
worse than outright Nazis, were now to be counted as
our allies.
Similarly, in China, the Communists were instructed
to cease fighting Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang
and to try to make an alliance with them against Japan.
The Chinese Communists were further instructed to
cease killing landowners and to represent themselves as
liberal agrarian reformers.
Thus overnight everything we had said and written in
previous years became heresy. The wise so-called scien-
tific workers were those who had always taken care to
say opposite things at the same time, and thus ensure
themselves against sudden changes in the Party line.
Everyone of us bore in mind the old Soviet precept:
If you think don’t speak!
If you speak don’t write!
If you write don’t pvblish!
If you publish recant immediately!
All the gold in private possession came into the hands
of the Russian Government long ago either through
Torgsin or extorted by the tortures of the secret police.
Except for their privately owned livestock, there is no
longer anything left of which the peasants can be ex-
propriated. The standard of life of the workers cannot
be reduced further.
Above all, the Stakhanov system-the tremendous
speeding up without regard to its effect on men or ma-
chinery-had the unavoidable result of decreasing pro-
duction from year to year as more and more machinery
broke down.
Today, however the Soviet government can ascribe
all its failures to the German invasion. Those who never
knew Russia before 1941 are easily convinced that the
misery, starvation and lack of the necessities of life are
all due to the war. The few of us who lived in Russia
earlier know that even in the best years preceding the
Nazi attack the standard of life of the mass of the Rus–
sian people was lower than under the Tsars.
The Friends of the Soviet Union, in the United States
and England, when driven into a comer, will still fight
on with the statement that unemployment has been abol-
ished in the USSR. But even if the Soviet Government’s
contention were true, which it is not, the same could
have been said of Nazi Germany.
The number of functionaries in Russia has been com-
puted by Stalin as eight millions. Some of these millions
-the engineers, technicians, accountants, qualified ad-
ministrators, clerks and typists-are performing labor as
socially necessary as the workers and peasants.
Others are engaged in such labors as praising Stalin and
other advertising and public relations activities. A large
but unknown number are engaged in spying on the pro-
ductive workers, technicians and managers, in subjecting
them to mental or physical tortures, and in guarding the
slave workers.
Another function of the parasitic Communist Party
members is to occupy positions as commissars or as chair-
men and directors of the state office organizations, or as
directors or managers of factories, in which capacity
they interfere with and ruin the work of the non-Party
specialists. They further perform the “labor” of driving
Our friends the Rabinovitches, who ranked as just
below the top Party bureaucrats, had a large modern flat,
a big datcha, and a private automobile all paid for by the
Commissariat of Foreign Trade for which Philip Rabi-
novitch worked. One of their two servants was also paid
for by the Commissariat, and Philip received a handsome
entertainment allowance over and above his salary. The
Rabinovitches were higher in the Communist social scale
than anyone else we knew, but their standard of life was
far below that of others we heard of.
The luxurious life lived by the Soviet aristocracy,
which the ordinary citizen glimpses only from afar, and
which is a direct violation of Lenin’s injunction that the Party members should receive salaries no higher than a
worker’s wage, is one of the most striking features of
Stalin’s Russia.
A little of the puritanical and self-sacrificing spirit
which had originally permeated the Bolshevik Party still
survived when I first went to live in Russia. All restraints
were openly discarded when Stalin told his henchmen
to “live joyously,” obviously seeking thus to buy the
loyalty of the Party members.
Since 1935 the expectation of life of a Communist
Party member has not been long. Any moment he may
lose Stalin’s favor, or be ruined by accusations leveled
at him by men on the next rung of the ladder seeking to
supplant him.
One evening my husband brought home with him a
friend of his youth whom he had by chance encountered.
This man, whose name I will not mention since it is pos-
sible he still lives, had been in prison both under the Tsar
and under Stalin.
Arcadi came to me in the kitchen to warn me not to
ask him questions.
“None of your English frankness, darling,” he said.
“He has probably been warned not to talk as the price
of his liberty. Let him talk if he will, but don’t ask ques-
tions.”
Our visitor gave us no details, but one remark was as
revealing as any description of his suffering or that of
others could have been. He said,
“We ought to have thanked God for the mercy of the
Tsar.”
By the time
its name had been changed to NKVD, the secret police
238 Lost Illusion
owned factories and farms as well as being in charge of
the timber camps, canal construction, road and railway
building and other public works.
It would have dismayed some at least of the friends of
the Soviet Union in England and the United States to
learn that the Russian Government could be even more
cruel than the Nazi Government. For the Nazis did at
least allow communication between prisoners and their
relatives, and informed the latter when a concentration
camp victim died or was shot.http://www.fredautley.com/pdffiles/book18.pdf